Mike Johns is an LA-based tech entrepreneur whose own website says he is “focused on the humanizing technology into everyday life in the future of work.”
If that sentence looks a little wonky to you, it’s because it comes from a larger paragraph that feels like it was written by AI. And then not a single human proofread it after that. Mike, an AI enthusiast, was basically kidnapped by a Waymo driverless car as it was driving him to the airport. He documented the whole affair and wrote a lengthy post about it on his LinkedIn page.
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In his LinkedIn post, Johns says he stepped into the car, clicked on the safety belt, and then the driverless car started to literally drive around in circles instead of taking him to the airport. Johns says the car circled for about five minutes, making eight rotations in a parking lot.
A Guy Got Trapped In A Driverless Car That Spun Him In Circles
As he was recording himself, a Waymo representative began speaking through the car’s sound system. The representative confirmed what Johns was experiencing, that his car was doing low-speed doughnuts in a parking lot. The representative was attempting to override the car, which is presumably how the whole situation was brought to an end.
Waymo is a driverless car company that is a subsidiary of Google’s parent company, Alphabet. Why the car decided that it was content to make right turns for the duration of eternity is currently unknown, but it’s not the first time that a Waymo has gotten stuck in a circle loop. This past December, an empty Waymo was found circling a roundabout 37 times.
At a certain point, you have to wonder if replacing the human Uber/Lyft/cab driver with an AI-powered autonomous vehicle that occasionally loses its mind and starts spinning in circles for no apparent reason was the best choice.
